News & Blogs Five 'Anarchists' Arrested For Allegedly Plotting To Blow Up Ohio Bridge

[venusinpisces]

They could have easily called the National Park Service and said "there is a bomb on the bridge, it's going to go off in 20 minutes." NPS would have had enough time to divert traffic/close roads, etc. and the loss of life would have been easily mitigated. .

Again, looking at the example of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government has repeatedly demonstrated their incapacity to deal with emergencies in a way which minimizes the loss of human life. Thousands of people died in New Orleans due to lack of food, water, and medical supplies, while evacuation routes were actively blocked by police. This response happened when there was a greater period of time to act than in the situation you describe, so there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the National Park Service would be any more competent. Besides, your conclusion is dependant on the assumption that government bureaucracies operate under the specific goal of protecting human life, whereas more often they are driven by the goal of protecting private property and business interests.

 

[venusinpisces]

Actually capital would've kept flowing. People would keep driving to work, trucks would keep delivering goods, it would just take that much more petroleum to do it. Blue collar working families would've been most affected. The bridge would've been rebuilt on the backs of the tax payers (probably with fundraiser $ too) to the benefit of some already rich contractor. Like I said, the small fish would get fucked, and the big fish would profit.

Not too mention that a large march shutting down a bridge will get support because the COMMUNITY is demanding it. When five individuals attack your town (especially ones without roots there) it's considered terrorism..

You make an interesting point, although I don't agree that the incompetence involved in the failed bridge plot could be classified as "terrorism", which is primarily a buzzword used to justify foreign military occupations and government surveillance, which in turn effectively create more terrorism to justify more of the same. However, what's interesting about your analysis is the idea that, when 5 people make a decision that affects hundreds of thousands, without consulting those people or inquiring into their wishes, it can hardly be classified as anarchism. Traditionally, anarchism is understood as the distribution of power amongst many, and when a minority make decisions that contrast with the motivations of the majority while simultaneously causing far-reaching consequences for that majority, this is yet another example of centralization of power, the same kind that "anti-statists" are so critical of.

 

[travelin]

love these "foiled just in time" terrorist plots. they need to get better writers though, they gettting a little too unbelievable.

 

[scatwomb]

Again, looking at the example of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government has repeatedly demonstrated their incapacity to deal with emergencies in a way which minimizes the loss of human life. Thousands of people died in New Orleans due to lack of food, water, and medical supplies, while evacuation routes were actively blocked by police. This response happened when there was a greater period of time to act than in the situation you describe, so there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the National Park Service would be any more competent. Besides, your conclusion is dependant on the assumption that government bureaucracies operate under the specific goal of protecting human life, whereas more often they are driven by the goal of protecting private property and business interests.

Calling government agencies and warning them of bombs has been an incredibly successful tactic for averting the loss of human life in the past. I see no reason whatsoever that it would not work today as well. Comparing a massive natural disaster, such as hurricane Katrina, to a plot to blow up a bridge is kind of an absurd stretch - the scale of helping hundreds of thousands of people in a disaster zone with destroyed transportation/communication infrastructure and utter chaos is so-fucking-different than having a few National Park Service employees put road blockages on both sides of a bridge and call the police.

So, how does allowing a bridge blow up help private property and business interests? I am pretty sure the monetary loss of crucial transportation infrastructure would be larger than having private contractors build a new bridge.

 

[venusinpisces]

So, how does allowing a bridge blow up help private property and business interests? I am pretty sure the monetary loss of crucial transportation infrastructure would be larger than having private contractors build a new bridge.

Surely you've heard of a thing called disaster capitalism? It was essentially the entire basis of the Iraq war: send in the troops to decimate crucial infrastructure, including local factories, roads, bridges, oil industry facilities, etc., then send in private contractors to rebuild at vastly overpriced rates, thus resulting in skyrocketing unemployment due to local jobs that were replaced by foreign private contractors. This is what the corporate media means when they talk about the "reconstruction effort". An entire book has been written about the subject of how natural disasters, as well as (state) terrorism often provide the rationale for theft of national resources (including transportation infrastructure) by transnational corporations, a process that inevitably results in widespread poverty in affected areas.

In some areas, when public roads were destroyed, these same roads were then redesigned with tolls so that locals were forced into longer commutes(much like Beegod Santana mentioned), thus funneling more money into the hands of the oil industry while simultaneously creating profit for foreign companies intent on privatizing essential services at the expense of local populations.
So, while many green anarchists delude themselves with the idea that they are somehow "smashing the state" by taking down industrial civilization, they ironically function as errand boys for global business elites eager to set the wheels of disaster capitalism in motion.

 

[scatwomb]

Oh my, now you're comparing the destruction of an isolated bridge in a National Park in Ohio with the destruction of an ENTIRE COUNTRY.

There is a thing called "scale," Jesus Christo!

I mean, you're totally right about what happened in Iraq, but, seriously, these are way different scales with different interests/stakeholders involved. I don't think they're comparable.

I think the lesson learned is to not buy a bomb from a stranger. And, that punk rockers called CYCO should be feared because of their terroristic tendencies :-D

 

[Eager]

The act of blowing up a bridge serves no practical purpose whatsoever besides painting all anarchists as dangerous threats to society.

Personally, I have witnessed green anarchists frothing at the mouth talking about how necessary it is to make attacks on the power grid in order to take down civilization.

You do not have to be a "green anarchist" to destroy tools and institutions of the bourgeoisie.

If a worker destroys her bosses machines while he is at lunch; is she, too a rabid green anarchist?

"Of course, nothing these kids did remotely approaches the level of competence necessary to accomplish anything close to widespread destruction, but for some reason the ideology behind it is one that is still tolerated by many anarchists even while more practical solutions such as building ecovillages are ignored. "

ECO VILLAGES? Are you fucking kidding? Your grand solution to capitalism is to run out in the woods in an attempt to remove yourself from the realities of it? How is that a practical solution to anything?

Clueless people like to romanticize the idea of a "zombie apocalypse" but, when it comes down to it, the people who will be the most harmed by industrial collapse are the peole at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Think Hurricane Katrina. Have you looked into the after effects of industrial collapse in New Orleans?

This isn't a "zombie apocolypse" that anyone is advocating; but a political revolution/insurrection/revolt by conscious members of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat.

You can no more compare a bridge bombing plot to hurricane Katrina, than you could compare the destruction during the Paris Commune to the destruction during the Great Chicago fire.

Do some research on revolutionary history before making such ridiculous and ahistorical comparisons.

The events of Hurricane Katrina laid bare the utter failure of the state to provide anything but misery and exploitation for the working people, and highlighted the tragic connection between wage labor and necessity within the capitalist system. People suffered in Katrina precisely because of industrialization, not in spite of it. To argue that "we need industrialization to save us from the brutality of industrialization", is another self-perpetuating strawman.

The question is whether we prefer the possibility of unknown dangers to the certainty of the present misery.

"And sorry if we don't show too much outrage over some kids getting condemned for accidentally killing a homeless man.", it's because that attitude fits into a greater context of sheltered anarchists who are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of working class poor people for a cause that will serve no one.

Who said anyone was willing to kill anyone? At what point did this made-up scenario where they "accidentally hurt a homeless person under the bridge" change to they "willingly" did so?

 

[Eager]

Actually capital would've kept flowing. People would keep driving to work, trucks would keep delivering goods, it would just take that much more petroleum to do it. Blue collar working families would've been most affected. The bridge would've been rebuilt on the backs of the tax payers (probably with fundraiser $ too) to the benefit of some already rich contractor. Like I said, the small fish would get fucked, and the big fish would profit.

Not too mention that a large march shutting down a bridge will get support because the COMMUNITY is demanding it. When five individuals attack your town (especially ones without roots there) it's considered terrorism.

I love how you blissfully ignored all my points. Not too mention your complete denial of reality.

Must be nice to have your head that far up your ass. The real world can never touch you there.

The "community" you're speaking of does not exist except in the dissent that at certain moments passes through it. The rest of the time the terrible community just simply is, eternally.

It reasons with the same moral categories that the no-longer-a-world world does; or at the very least it has the same reasons for doing so. It knows about rights and injustices, but it always parses them on the basis of the lacking coherence of the world it opposes. It criticizes the violation of a right, brings it out into the light of day, brings attention to it. But who was it that established (and violated) that right? It was the world, to which the terrible community refuses to belong. And to whom is its discourse addressed? To the attention of the world that it denies. What does the terrible community want, then? The improvement of the existing state of things. And what does the world desire? The same thing.

 

[venusinpisces]

Keep on thinking you'll win the support of the "lumpenproletariat" by destroying industrial civilization. Meanwhile, the rest of the working class will be too worried about getting their utilities shut off to pay attention.

 

[scatwomb]

Keep on thinking you'll win the support of the "lumpenproletariat" by destroying industrial civilization. Meanwhile, the rest of the working class will be too worried about getting their utilities shut off to pay attention.

Dude, I just don't want to work - I am selfish. I don't like the idea of working for some symbolic abstraction (money) so I can gain some more abstract cultural capital (prestige) in this fucked up culture. I am sick of all abstraction - sick of Karl Marx - I want to live in concrete reality.

 

[ped]

ECO VILLAGES? Are you fucking kidding? Your grand solution to capitalism is to run out in the woods in an attempt to remove yourself from the realities of it? How is that a practical solution to anything?

Hmmm. Eco villages are actually offering something real on a day to day basis. On the other hand early twenty somethings whos primary support in life has come almost exclusively from mommy and daddy out spray painting stop signs, holding a protest and breaking a few windows though, man, that is some fo-real shit right there. Clearly all this has been thought through real well.

The system thrives because it satisfies the pleasure principle and gives the monkey a game to play every day. It doesn't try to change human nature, it understands it and effectively exploits it. You are unbelievably naive and utterly out of you league if you think destroying random minor infrastructure is going affect some nebulous change (to what you have no real idea) based simply on recognition of the moral and ethical pitfalls of industrial capitalist society. It's almost as if it is a case of rebel for rebel sake. But hey we can be pretend revolutionaries and might even get laid for it!!!

At best all you're doing is giving the government easy pickings to caricaturize dissendent ideology without actually affecting or changing a damn thing. And the propaganda war is the front line for them, like it or not. They have the guns and the people. It is well documented the CIA did exactly that in the 60's in fact. Hell we know now that wallstreet funded the Bolsheviks for crying out loud. The government is smarter than you think as this little gem of a story illustrates so well.

You want to do something useful? Instead of the banal scenesters playing elitist snob in the infantile will to be relevent and special, encourage newbs to travel. Actively help them in fact. Help setup systems that grow and sustain the lifestyle long term. The more people doing it the less people out there working and the less society becomes dependant on jobs and money. That's the real slavery. You know, start a self-sustaining eco village or something. The inverse of Ayn Rands John Galt. What poetic irony it would be. It's a no-lose situation as even if it doesn't work in changing society, you at least escaped. But that requires hard work, maturity and dedication.

And finally you have too much faith in capitalism anyway. You don't have to do anything to it other than cease trying to stop it or fix it. You're not going to stop it and if you'd leave it alone it will strangle itself. It's what it does by its fundemental nature. But even that doesn't matter because it's built on the premise of infinite growth. And because of this it will fall in the not-to-distant future as its foundation (energy) inevitably slips away.

 

[finn]

I'm sorry, but those kids who got arrested were as smart as a box of sand. The way to go about this is to ask for payment to consider the whole thing, since it's the only way to know if they're serious. Then after you get the money, say you decided to not be part of the conspiracy. With enough FBI money, maybe you can start your own ecovillage!

 

[scatwomb]

They should have just learned how to make their own bombs. Dumdums.

 

[spoorprint]

I am sure their idea had a few goals.

1) To temporarily disrupt the flow of capital.
2) To destroy a bridge in a "natural" area.
3) To spark similar actions across the country.

Like Eager was saying, we have no indisputible reason to think that the destruction of this bridge would have led to the death of anyone. As was mentioned, most (all?) actions by green anarchists mitigate human death to the best of their ability. They could have easily called the National Park Service and said "there is a bomb on the bridge, it's going to go off in 20 minutes." NPS would have had enough time to divert traffic/close roads, etc. and the loss of life would have been easily mitigated.

I am hoping the 5 guy's lawyers will fight this on the grounds of entrapment. It started off as 5 self-described anarchists wanting to throw smoke bombs of of buildings in Cleveland, a relatively innocuous and kind of silly tactic to disrupt the flow of capital on May Day, and turned into "LET'S BLOW UP A FUCKING BRIDGE" after the STATE got involved. Kinda disgusting.

Fuck the State. And fuck Statist sympathizers.

Look, to try to rationalize after the fact how this could have been a good action misses the point:It wass entirely an FBI action, concocted for the states own purposes.The only worthwhile question here is why did people fall for this trap?
First the action clearly was not theirs and did not fit in with their strategy.The orininal plan of useing smoke bombs as a diversion while attacking corporate signs indicates they wanted to make an Anti-corporate statement. Nothing indicates that this had anything to do with nature or the park.So how did they get suckered into an infrastructure attack PLANNED BY THE FBI? My guess ist hat the FBI got wind of an affinity group close to Occupy Cleveland, and pulled out a pre-packaged "action" originally intended for some isolated Muslim kid (the kind they have framed many times now.) But why did these brothers fall for it? Again it in no way resembles their prior strategy.
I think its worthwhile to note that the agent provacatuer was African American and all five of these comrades are white.I wonder if when this guy started to egg them into this new action, they hesitated to challenge or disagree with him out of liberal guilt or a fear of appearing rascist (which since it "treated him as a problem" would have been sutbly rascist).

I also wonder if they were guilt tripped about not being militant enough or committed enough .I feel almost certain that at some point someone smelled something funny and failed to say anything.

That brings me to my last point.I've always felt absolute consensus in large open groups was absurd- but in affinity groups it has a purpose. If even one of these guys had had the courage to block consensus, these guys wouldn't have been entrapped; but it only works if you are willing to use it.

 

[sahaynee moonbow]

roadblocks and construction uniforms were used to dissuade the possibility of people getting hurt.
don't ever read an article attacking an anarchist for it's face value..it really aggravates me the way media uses language like " well bob the alleged ahem* "anarchists" decided to get fucked by some culture nazis the moment they started waving their little red and black "anarchy" flags downtown"... you know the fuckin "alleged" with quotations like they --REALLY-- want to isolate anarchism in every media outlet as possible as being something they can't Quite criminalize but they really need to push for it to give you willies without knowing why oo0o0o0o0 scary anarchists

 

[sahaynee moonbow]

curbscore you're dead on too- connor knew shaq was a cop btw but shaq was providing JOBS and a FREE PLACE TO STAY over the course of months while they were being entrapped.. connor asked them to back out but wanted to keep the odd job doing work

 

[Eager]

"connor knew shaq was a cop btw but shaq was providing JOBS and a FREE PLACE TO STAY over the course of months while they were being entrapped.. connor asked them to back out but wanted to keep the odd job doing work "
Wait is there an online source for that information?